Lou (Melissa James) and James (Patrick Heusinger) are a young couple who have recently moved from Chicago to London after some unspecified unpleasantness in Chicago possibly related to Lou’s fragile mental health and the deep trauma in her past. She sleepwalks and she “loses time” but hopefully the powerful medication she’s on has things under control now.
James’s mother, Carolanne (Pippa Winslow), an interfering evangelical Christian, keeps harassing the couple about when they plan to start a family and asking intrusive questions about Lou’s wellbeing. And it quickly becomes evident that London might not represent the fresh start that everyone had hoped. As everyone familiar with the Paranormal Activity horror film franchise knows, it’s not always houses that are haunted — sometimes it’s people. By the time Lou and James call in a medium, Etheline (Jackie Morrison), they’re already in deep trouble.
All anyone really wants from a scary play is, well, for it to actually be scary. Basic stuff but any number of stage versions of ghost stories fail on this front. Not this spin-off from the movie series — this show absolutely delivers. Director Felix Barrett plays knowingly with horror film tropes, there is a spine-tingling sense of mounting dread and, crucially, several proper hair-standing-on-end shocks. My ears were ringing from the screams of audience members. It’s an oddly uplifting thing to hear the laughter of relief that inevitably follows a powerful jumpscare.
The set, designed by Fly Davis, really works in service of the show. We’re looking at a house in cross-section — kitchen and living area on the ground floor — bedroom, bathroom and spare room above. Light shifts across it as cars drive past outside and there are numerous shadowy recesses in which lurk who knows what.
All in all, this is terrifyingly good
Hats off to the illusions designer, Chris Fisher. One spectacular coup de théâtre, executed with a sort of gleefully evil elan, gave me genuine chills. It’s a bonus that the performances are excellent and the script, by Levi Holloway, much better than it needed it to be. There are even some pretty solid gags providing much needed comic relief. All in all, this is terrifyingly good.
There’s a hint of folk horror in The Playboy of the Western World which opens with keening mourners all in black processing across the stage and which also features straw-clad mummers who wouldn’t be out of place in The Wicker Man or Midsommar. They emphasise the strangeness of this classic comedy.
Christy Mahon walks into Michael Flaherty’s rural pub on the west coast of Ireland spouting a story about having killed his father by smashing his head in. This great feat wins him the admiration of Flaherty and his customers, as well as getting the local lasses all hot and bothered, none more so than Flaherty’s daughter, barmaid Pegeen, who is moved to ditch her wet fiancée and set her cap at this intriguing bad boy. The Widow Quin is another who fancies her chances. But can they trust the lad’s story about his old da’?
This production is very much enhanced by Katie Davenport’s brilliant design. The pub — a basic affair with bare wooden tables, brooms and agricultural tools hanging on the walls, a roof of corrugated iron — gives on to a field of wheat stooks and beyond, the sea beneath a big sky. It really creates a sense of the expansive wild west of Ireland.
With its depiction of drunken bumpkin idiots and lustful women, it’s not difficult to see why Irish nationalists dismissed J.M. Synge’s play as a slur on the national character. There were riots when it was first staged in 1907 in Dublin’s Abbey theatre. Sinn Fein founder Arthur Griffith condemned the play as “a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to”. He really needed to get out more.
The fine cast in this revival by the Abbey’s current artistic director, Caitríona McLaughlin, includes two stars of the hit TV comedy Derry Girls, Nicola Coughlan as Pegeen and Siobhán McSweeney as the Widow Quin, Lorcan Cranitch as Michael Flaherty, giving a masterclass in playing drunk, and Éanna Hardwicke who plays Christy.
They speak in what I assume is an authentic local accent but it’s an accent so thick that I was relieved to be at a captioned performance. I think I understood maybe two thirds of what was going on but enjoyed it nevertheless.
I rarely understand that much in a John Le Carré novel. Everyone has at least one writer that they really don’t get but that everyone else seems to love. It’s Le Carré for me. I’ve tried with the books and I’ve tried with the screen adaptations and, with the honourable exception of the 2011 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley, they all leave me cold. As did The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, the first ever stage version of a Le Carre novel.
Adapted by David Eldridge, directed by Jeremy Herrin and starring Rory Keenan as Alec Leamas as the titular MI6 man, this is a stylish, atmospheric production and reasonably faithful to the plot of the book, a complex (i.e. bewildering) Cold War story of British Intelligence attempting to bamboozle its East German foes. It does a good job of conjuring up the bleak, morally ambiguous world in which Leamas operates, a world in which no one, least of all one’s own side, can be trusted. And a world about which I couldn’t care less.
Just a couple of weeks after this show opened, the BBC announced a major new eight-part adaptation of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold along with A Legacy of Spies starring Matthew Macfadyen, Charlie Hunnam, Daniel Brühl and there was great rejoicing so it does just seem to be just me who doesn’t get it. I’ll stick with Len Deighton and Mick Herron, thanks.
Paranormal Activity at www.theambassadorstheatre.co.
The Playboy of the Western World at www.nationaltheatre.org.uk runs until 28 February
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold at sohoplace.org runs until 21 February 2026
